Now then that hopefully a few of you have pondered my question, the followup.
I ask about how harmful spam REALLY is because of what it would take to even begin to eradicate it. It would require government intervention into the Internet, and the creation of new laws aimed SOLELY at online behavior.
Is that what you REALLY want? Americans, think of our government's inglorious forays into Internet regulation previously. How about the laws which made it illegal for parents to discuss safe sex with their children via e-mail? Or that current monstrosity of a bill which just got passed, which will likely increase spam more than stop it. And we won't even go into things from the more oppressive governments, like the so-called "Great Firewall of China".
I repeat, is that what you REALLY want?
That is what you are getting by allowing spam to be inflated to an issue of such huge importance. The government stepping in and almost certainly mucking things up. And I bring up these points because of my underlying belief that, like it or not, spam will NEVER be stopped. Outlawing it in any country will just cause it to move to others, and there will always be countries willing to let the spammers do their business from there. So it would bring in government intervention that would, ultimately, produce almost nothing.
And another consideration - what about the "ecosystem" which has cropped up around spamming? The filter writers, the sysadmins, the server upgraders, etc etc. One post said that "billions" are spent fighting spam. Simple logic says the majority of that money is going into the hands of lower-level workers rather than getting sucked into the corporate coffers. And that's good for the economy.
Ask a Wildebeast, and he'll tell you a Lion is evil and needs to be wiped out. But if you look at the big picture, you see why both the Lion and the Wildebeast need to exist side by side.
I repeat, I am only asking QUESTIONS and positing things to consider. I fear that far too many, by allowing "spamming" to become such a personal, emotional thing to them, are rushing towards decisive actions *without thinking through the consequences.* And THAT is my ultimate point. There is NO magic button that can be pressed that says "no spam now." But people seem to believe there is.
There will be further-reaching consequences for any action taken. So, just *consider* - is tolerating the existance of spam - costly and annoying though it is - perhaps still better than the side-effects of any serious action aimed at wiping it out?
In short, I am simply warning - be careful what you wish for.
And, in light of your jalepeno suggestion, you do not think my comment about blind hatred applies to you... why?
Calling me ignorant, and then launching into a sadistic revenge fantasy, hardly bolsters your argument. In fact, I would say it automatically denotes you as being too emotionally involved to be a reliable source of information.
Oh, I'll definately agree there. While I'm not strictly libertarian, I think the global nature of the Internet means it's a spectacularly BAD idea for any single government to attempt to impose global regulations upon it. And that nightmare of a bill the US Congress just passed is almost certainly going to make matters worse, not better - ESPECIALLY if the "do not spam" list gets created. (please, PLEASE let the FCC see how dumb that idea is...)
So you could say the OTHER prong of my question is, "Is spam so bad that government intervention against it is actually necessary, and would cause more good than harm?"
Please don't mod this troll, this is an honest inquiry.
This article got me thinking again. Every time the subject of spam comes up, there are always innumerable people talking about how if spam is left unchecked, it's going to destroy the Internet and\or e-mail as we know it. Thus spammers MUST be stopped for the common good.
Are there, in fact, any NUMBERS backing this hypothesis up? Any statistics showing that at current rates of growth, by 20XX spam will consume so much bandwidth that the Internet will collapse? Or that spam accounts for bandwidth costs which are significantly higher than any other popular form of packets flying around? (I never hear ISPs complaining that popup ads are causing them huge extra bills...) Or that somewhere along the line, the innumerable filters that exist will cease to be of any use, and suddenly everyone really WILL be flooded with more spam than they can ever deal with?
I ask the latter especially, since filtering is becoming more and more common. Some browsers have it built into their mail clients. All of the major webmail clients automatically filter - I get approximately 1 piece of spam in my yahoo box a day. (and the spam folder cleans itself without my even looking at it) And even, increasingly, ISPs are preemptively filtering before the mail even gets past them.
If we want to debate the merits of "freedom to market" versus "intrusive annoyance," that's one thing. But I see on any thread involving spammers a sort of reflexive hatred - and assumption of Evil Intent - which would seem more appropriate for a religious war on some Christian board.
So, I ask, simply - is there any substantial evidence that Spam is truly a threat larger than just being a general annoyance?
I'm not sure if that was meant as a joke, but Hormel actually addressed the issue and, if nothing else, conceeded the inevitable - bulk e-mail is now named "spam" and there's nothing they can do about it. They just ask that you make sure to write SPAM in all caps when referring to the meat byproduct.
K++ was already underground. The vast majority of people use plain Kazaa, blissfully unaware that they've installed a billion data miners on their system. And it was rarely exactly EASY to find a new copy of K++ anyway. So changing the distribution method won't alter much.
the makers of K++ did not code the app from source, maybe they could give out the source of their add-ons but as I understood it, they just hacked up the binaries of kazaa
Well, however they did it, there should be no reason they could produce a DIY version that alters the files locally from a normal Kazaa install. At that point, Fair Use comes into play. If the files are on my computer, I can do to them whatever I want. And if actual Kazaa code isn't included in the mod package, they're pretty much sheilded from infringement.
Unless Sharman tries to press a DMCA suit, I suppose. But I don't think anyone's attempted to stretch the DMCA to cover any binary file yet.
Wow. That's a truly impressive gross oversimplification of what I actually said. Do you always alter arguments you dislike to an extreme position that's easier to attack?
Right. Like I said, I'd be willing to accept any number up to, say, 25%. But over one third of the respondants all saying the Mac was the single most influential computer? (especially when everyone knows it was really just borrowed (with permission, I know) from Xerox) When a statistic is simply too far off-base to be believable, it becomes reasonable to assume that something was off.
And that goes double for anything online because there is no precision in the sample set whatsoever. Ultimately, when online, the sample set is determined solely by whoever happens to see the poll. All it would take is the original poll getting posted to one Mac enthusiasts board, and without even deliberate stuffing, it would win simply because the vast majority of respondants linked to it from there.
Which goes back to my saying that online polls are only about one step removed from doing RAND.
Meh. The program will live on, it'll just go underground a couple notches. Or if the creators wanted to be evil, they could "accidentally" let the source code slip out.
For that matter, retooling the program as a patch wouldn't be that bad an idea. People download the real Kazaa, and then there's a prog they can download which converts it into K++.
It'll just be a little while before things stablize and it's generally available again.
Speaking with RatFaced, one of the Kazaa Lite forum moderators today and our contact at K-Lite, I have uncovered news that the Kazaa Lite K++ project has been shut down by Sharman Networks on grounds of copyright infringement.
The project, which had been set up to block spy and ad ware within the Kazaa Media Desktop Program has achieved notoriety within the P2p world through its simplistic approach and success in reverse engineering the Kazaa application.
However, the program infringed on the copyright of Sharman Networks, the company that now own and program the Kazaa Media Desktop application, after the purchase of the code and copyright in 2002. The FastTrack (Kazaa) network is financed through advertising systems, which Kazaa Lite K++ does not include, and so was seen as a threat by the owners.
Sharman have threatened legal action, and ordered that the offending content be removed from the official Kazaa Lite sites, including http://www.kazaalite.tk/ which now contains no reference to the existance of the application.
RatFaced said that the decision was ?Ironic, that Kazaa is complaining about copyright issues, especially as K-Lite ++ stands for everything that Kazaa CLAIMS to stand for... but fails to deliver.?
We will perhaps never see Kazaa Lite again, but we can hope that users will remain aware of the spyware that is hidden inside the Kazaa application, which is used to finance the creation of the software.
eMule and WinMX offer spyware-free alternatives to Kazaa.
Probably because internet polls, generally, are only slightly more accurate than using the (RAND) function. If he ignored the option, that suggests he had reason to believe the poll was spoofed in some way. And for that matter, so do I. 10% I'd believe. 20% would be stretching things, but I'd accept it. But over 1/3 of respondants, when Apple only has something like 5% of the overall market? Something was going on.
Your right to WHAT, exactly? Annoying tho cell phones are, I'm pretty sure there's a right to speech, whereas I don't recall an innumerated Right to a Quiet Elevator Ride.
While the 9th Amendment says that there are other non-innumerated rights, the ones that ARE numerated clearly take priority.
Well, sure the parties moved and switched and flip-flopped. But how many times in US history has there ever been a strong third party that lasted more than a few years? Not often. And still not for very long. Hamilton and Jefferson laid down the basic guidelines for politics in this country, and rarely has anyone seriously deviated from them. And even if the Federalist party itself didn't last long, Hamilton's ideals have ultimately been borne out more than Jefferson's.
If it hadn't been for their systematic disputes pretty much defining political discourse in our country, we could have gone other routes. Probably into a multi-party system like Canada or France. (which is obviously what they would have prefered) But instead, by both being such good ideologues and having such strength of personality, they basically caused the two-party (and thus two-idea) system to get cemented.
It runs deeper than that, though. We AREN'T a democracy. We're a Republic. Which means in theory we shouldn't have people up in the Senate playing winner-takes-all games. It's indicative of an all-around breakdown in the system that things in Texas got remotely as bad as they did, on all sides.
Which really stems from people's foolish belief that they are somehow identified by their party affiliation. Which is ludicrous, especially since the Party's platform generally swings around like a windsock. Yet most people believe it. Hell, most probably don't even realize how wildly their party's beliefs fluxuate.
I always consider it one of the great historical ironies that one of the only things Jefferson and Hamilton ever agreed on was that a 2-party system was a bad thing. And yet their battles caused us to get locked into one.
And would the person who modded this as flamebait be so kind as to offer an explanation of the redistricting's rationale that does NOT reduce to being totally rediculous?
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Didn't think so. If you disagree, either reply with an opinion, or go read another post. Hiding behind mod points is just sad - especially when it's in defense of an unsupportable position.
And just for the record, I would be saying the exact same thing if it were the Democrats who pulled this.
You know the REALLY sad thing? It wasn't even about Texas politics. It was about sending more Republicans to D.C.
What staggered me was how many people bought the Republican line as to why the redistricting was necessary. It was so baldly, on-its-face unsupportable that the only explanation I can come up with is that no one believed they would lie in such an audacious manner.
Their argument boiled down to: X percent (I think around 66%) of the population voted for Bush, a Republican. Yet there are more Democrats in the US Congress than Republican. Therefore the districts are obviously incorrect, Gerrymandered, and MUST be corrected immediately.
How many things wrong with this statement can we find? And don't forget - in the STATE Congress, Republicans outnumber Democrats by a rather large margin.
Yet a huge number of people bought it unquestioningly. (up to 50% at one point, IIRC) That's what terrifies me - that so few actually took the slightest moment to ponder a rationalization that simply had no relationship to reality at all. Either half of Texas truly knows *nothing* about Civics (that the Republican majority invalidated its own argument) or that they are simply willing to take ANY crap that comes out of their Representative's mouth without hesitation.
I worked for one of the outsource tech groups that handed customer support for Dell. Their global policy is (or at least was as of a year ago) that they do not support any third party software that didn't ship with the box, period. The Dell techs weren't even technically allowed to help customers remove viruses, although many found loopholes around that. ("I'm not removing a virus, that's against our policies. I'm merely cleaning items out of your startup group and registry which don't need to be there to help the Operating System run better.")
So it's definately a lousy policy, but this would be a clarification, nothing more.
Slashdot Mirror
However, since your final paragraph seems to be acting as though that one point was the whole of my argument, I would guess not.
Sigh.
I ask about how harmful spam REALLY is because of what it would take to even begin to eradicate it. It would require government intervention into the Internet, and the creation of new laws aimed SOLELY at online behavior.
Is that what you REALLY want? Americans, think of our government's inglorious forays into Internet regulation previously. How about the laws which made it illegal for parents to discuss safe sex with their children via e-mail? Or that current monstrosity of a bill which just got passed, which will likely increase spam more than stop it. And we won't even go into things from the more oppressive governments, like the so-called "Great Firewall of China".
I repeat, is that what you REALLY want?
That is what you are getting by allowing spam to be inflated to an issue of such huge importance. The government stepping in and almost certainly mucking things up. And I bring up these points because of my underlying belief that, like it or not, spam will NEVER be stopped. Outlawing it in any country will just cause it to move to others, and there will always be countries willing to let the spammers do their business from there. So it would bring in government intervention that would, ultimately, produce almost nothing.
And another consideration - what about the "ecosystem" which has cropped up around spamming? The filter writers, the sysadmins, the server upgraders, etc etc. One post said that "billions" are spent fighting spam. Simple logic says the majority of that money is going into the hands of lower-level workers rather than getting sucked into the corporate coffers. And that's good for the economy.
Ask a Wildebeast, and he'll tell you a Lion is evil and needs to be wiped out. But if you look at the big picture, you see why both the Lion and the Wildebeast need to exist side by side.
I repeat, I am only asking QUESTIONS and positing things to consider. I fear that far too many, by allowing "spamming" to become such a personal, emotional thing to them, are rushing towards decisive actions *without thinking through the consequences.* And THAT is my ultimate point. There is NO magic button that can be pressed that says "no spam now." But people seem to believe there is.
There will be further-reaching consequences for any action taken. So, just *consider* - is tolerating the existance of spam - costly and annoying though it is - perhaps still better than the side-effects of any serious action aimed at wiping it out?
In short, I am simply warning - be careful what you wish for.
I ask a simple question asking for hard DATA rather than emotionally-loaded invective, and this is your response. Does it seem reasonable to you?
And the answer to your almost-stated question is, "Because I will not hate any group solely because the majority tells me to."
Calling me ignorant, and then launching into a sadistic revenge fantasy, hardly bolsters your argument. In fact, I would say it automatically denotes you as being too emotionally involved to be a reliable source of information.
Try dialing it down a bit next time.
So you could say the OTHER prong of my question is, "Is spam so bad that government intervention against it is actually necessary, and would cause more good than harm?"
These are questions I fear too few are asking.
This article got me thinking again. Every time the subject of spam comes up, there are always innumerable people talking about how if spam is left unchecked, it's going to destroy the Internet and\or e-mail as we know it. Thus spammers MUST be stopped for the common good.
Are there, in fact, any NUMBERS backing this hypothesis up? Any statistics showing that at current rates of growth, by 20XX spam will consume so much bandwidth that the Internet will collapse? Or that spam accounts for bandwidth costs which are significantly higher than any other popular form of packets flying around? (I never hear ISPs complaining that popup ads are causing them huge extra bills...) Or that somewhere along the line, the innumerable filters that exist will cease to be of any use, and suddenly everyone really WILL be flooded with more spam than they can ever deal with?
I ask the latter especially, since filtering is becoming more and more common. Some browsers have it built into their mail clients. All of the major webmail clients automatically filter - I get approximately 1 piece of spam in my yahoo box a day. (and the spam folder cleans itself without my even looking at it) And even, increasingly, ISPs are preemptively filtering before the mail even gets past them.
If we want to debate the merits of "freedom to market" versus "intrusive annoyance," that's one thing. But I see on any thread involving spammers a sort of reflexive hatred - and assumption of Evil Intent - which would seem more appropriate for a religious war on some Christian board.
So, I ask, simply - is there any substantial evidence that Spam is truly a threat larger than just being a general annoyance?
Too bad, in this debacle, both parties are equally culpable.
LOL... That's great. Supply side bulk e-mailing. Someone with points Funny this up.
Oooh, and I just found the link to their page about spam vs SPAM.
And THEREFORE it's pointless.
Not that I'm disagreeing.
K++ was already underground. The vast majority of people use plain Kazaa, blissfully unaware that they've installed a billion data miners on their system. And it was rarely exactly EASY to find a new copy of K++ anyway. So changing the distribution method won't alter much.
Unless Sharman tries to press a DMCA suit, I suppose. But I don't think anyone's attempted to stretch the DMCA to cover any binary file yet.
Wow. That's a truly impressive gross oversimplification of what I actually said. Do you always alter arguments you dislike to an extreme position that's easier to attack?
And that goes double for anything online because there is no precision in the sample set whatsoever. Ultimately, when online, the sample set is determined solely by whoever happens to see the poll. All it would take is the original poll getting posted to one Mac enthusiasts board, and without even deliberate stuffing, it would win simply because the vast majority of respondants linked to it from there.
Which goes back to my saying that online polls are only about one step removed from doing RAND.
For that matter, retooling the program as a patch wouldn't be that bad an idea. People download the real Kazaa, and then there's a prog they can download which converts it into K++.
It'll just be a little while before things stablize and it's generally available again.
The project, which had been set up to block spy and ad ware within the Kazaa Media Desktop Program has achieved notoriety within the P2p world through its simplistic approach and success in reverse engineering the Kazaa application.
However, the program infringed on the copyright of Sharman Networks, the company that now own and program the Kazaa Media Desktop application, after the purchase of the code and copyright in 2002. The FastTrack (Kazaa) network is financed through advertising systems, which Kazaa Lite K++ does not include, and so was seen as a threat by the owners.
Sharman have threatened legal action, and ordered that the offending content be removed from the official Kazaa Lite sites, including http://www.kazaalite.tk/ which now contains no reference to the existance of the application.
RatFaced said that the decision was ?Ironic, that Kazaa is complaining about copyright issues, especially as K-Lite ++ stands for everything that Kazaa CLAIMS to stand for... but fails to deliver.?
We will perhaps never see Kazaa Lite again, but we can hope that users will remain aware of the spyware that is hidden inside the Kazaa application, which is used to finance the creation of the software.
eMule and WinMX offer spyware-free alternatives to Kazaa.
Probably because internet polls, generally, are only slightly more accurate than using the (RAND) function. If he ignored the option, that suggests he had reason to believe the poll was spoofed in some way. And for that matter, so do I. 10% I'd believe. 20% would be stretching things, but I'd accept it. But over 1/3 of respondants, when Apple only has something like 5% of the overall market? Something was going on.
While the 9th Amendment says that there are other non-innumerated rights, the ones that ARE numerated clearly take priority.
If it hadn't been for their systematic disputes pretty much defining political discourse in our country, we could have gone other routes. Probably into a multi-party system like Canada or France. (which is obviously what they would have prefered) But instead, by both being such good ideologues and having such strength of personality, they basically caused the two-party (and thus two-idea) system to get cemented.
Which really stems from people's foolish belief that they are somehow identified by their party affiliation. Which is ludicrous, especially since the Party's platform generally swings around like a windsock. Yet most people believe it. Hell, most probably don't even realize how wildly their party's beliefs fluxuate.
I always consider it one of the great historical ironies that one of the only things Jefferson and Hamilton ever agreed on was that a 2-party system was a bad thing. And yet their battles caused us to get locked into one.
.
.
.
Didn't think so. If you disagree, either reply with an opinion, or go read another post. Hiding behind mod points is just sad - especially when it's in defense of an unsupportable position.
And just for the record, I would be saying the exact same thing if it were the Democrats who pulled this.
What staggered me was how many people bought the Republican line as to why the redistricting was necessary. It was so baldly, on-its-face unsupportable that the only explanation I can come up with is that no one believed they would lie in such an audacious manner.
Their argument boiled down to: X percent (I think around 66%) of the population voted for Bush, a Republican. Yet there are more Democrats in the US Congress than Republican. Therefore the districts are obviously incorrect, Gerrymandered, and MUST be corrected immediately.
How many things wrong with this statement can we find? And don't forget - in the STATE Congress, Republicans outnumber Democrats by a rather large margin.
Yet a huge number of people bought it unquestioningly. (up to 50% at one point, IIRC) That's what terrifies me - that so few actually took the slightest moment to ponder a rationalization that simply had no relationship to reality at all. Either half of Texas truly knows *nothing* about Civics (that the Republican majority invalidated its own argument) or that they are simply willing to take ANY crap that comes out of their Representative's mouth without hesitation.
Sigh.
So it's definately a lousy policy, but this would be a clarification, nothing more.